What once ensured that I sat at a table next to the teacher is now posted, Monday through Friday.

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My second chapbook, "The Second Book of Pearl: The Cats" is now available as either a paper chapbook or as a downloadable item. See below for the Pay Pal link or click on its cover just to the right of the newest blog post to download to your Kindle, iPad, or Nook. Just $3.99 for inspired tales of gin, gambling addiction and inter-feline betrayal.

My first chapbook, I Was Raised to be A Lert is in its third printing and is available both via the PayPal link below and on smashwords! Order one? Download one? It's all for you, baby!

Monday, February 9, 2015

Yet Another Lousy Post About Winter

The grayness…

I look around, note the frozen hipsters on the bus (once their skin goes black, there’s nothing to do but mash them up and make bread with them).

I bemoan the cuts on my hands where I’ve carelessly run their dry knuckles against the hard-edged corners of the month of February.

I absentmindedly count the layers of clothing I am wearing (fully 8 pieces more than in, say, August).

And I sigh.

Winter has its boot on the back of my neck.

I think back, fondly, to summer. My memories have developed the soft-focus affect of a dream, just moments after waking. June. July. I don’t remember wearing shoes then. And I recall stepping outside – now get this! – without putting on a hat.

Who goes outside without wearing a hat?

From the deepest, most humid parts of my brain, the squat bald man in my head slides his pudgy, dimpled hands against each other gleefully. The smell of smoke accompanies him.

Where did he get those cigarettes?

I close my eyes. I hate when he smokes in there.

“Why don’t you,” he says, “call in sick a couple days?” He takes a drag of his Pall Mall, blows the hit toward my left ear. “We’ll get drunk,” he says, “and rub our dry little hands over our tubby little middles, see what shakes loose.”

As if to illustrate, he runs his hands over his own belly. His cigarette, badly in need of ashing, dangles from his lips.

I turn away.

“Come on,” he says. “We’ll do Stupid Human Tricks.” He pulls his tee-shirt up – the one that says “I’m Not a Doctor, But I’ll Take a Look” – pats his head with one hand, rubs his gut with the other.

I sigh.

The ash from his cigarette falls, wiping out most of second grade.

I blink slowly. I didn’t need those memories, anyway.

The squat, bald man in my head takes another pull from his cigarette – “squares”, he calls them – and closes his left eye, peers at me with the right. “So what’re you going to do about it?”

I sigh again, something I’m thinking of taking up competitively. “I have a sick day planned for March,” I say.

That`s the grand thing about aging....time goes faster. We find ourselves saying things like, `wasn`t it Christmas just yesterday? and, "I can't believe it's mid February already." As for that squat bald man in your mind...well...the hard part about aging is that you start to look like him.

But ... but ... February is so full of chocolate, Pearl. You need to buy some V-Day goodies now while the selection is good, then buy some more before V-Day because the first stuff will be gone, then buy some on sale after V-Day and then, why, then it will be nearly March!